81–90 of 123 posts
What frustrates me about articles like this (even professional ones -- this simplifies for a general audience) is that they only look at one side of the equation. Low inflation is the opposite side, and it's interesting. Yes, GDP$ per unit hour has not gone up much, but the flip side is that the economic value of the output has gone down . If you look in terms of PPP, workers are doing better: fewer labor hours go in…
What is PPP?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a "why is there so much office work" question, or "why are there so many people travelling to offices"? On the former: perhaps the Jevons Paradox at work, or something alligned with it, Baumol's Cost Disease and Amdahl's Law both come to mind. The Jevons Paradox notes that as a thing becomes cheaper , the total amount of it demanded can increase . A particularly noteable case of this is the cotton gin ("cotto…
Re "Jevons Paradox". That doesn't mean employment goes up. There's a little book, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", from a century ago which outlines three ways this worked out. The "good case" was mechanized typesetting, the Linotype. This produced a huge increase in print shop productivity and a huge increase in the amount of printed material. The result was an increase in printing employment (That lasted until th…
What the Jevons Paradox meansm more specifically, is that the cost of a good or service is reduced. Taking costs as opportunity costs (Krugman, Economics, 2008, "All costs are opportunity costs."), you're making a thing cheaper.
The response depends on what that thing is and what the relative demand is.
Printing (and communications/information in general) is, well, an opportunity for minting money. The capacity to spew more crap is pretty much endless (hence: the modern WWW). Reducing cost constraints will increase output.
The glassblowing case, and skill requirements, are one where you're probably seeing interactions with a larger, oversupplied, labour market. Offer a lower-skilled position, avail a larger pool, and cut labour costs whilst increasing output.
Stone planers meet an intrinsically limited demand, unless you can suddenly increase the demand for the product. Creating an interest in stone statuary, or stone walls, or something of the sort might work. Pet rocks, Beanie Babies, Bratz Dolls, iPods.
That's a marketing problem....
I've been kicking around other areas and interactions of reduced costs.
Reduced travel costs (railroads) made holidays and holiday resorts possible, as well as commuter suburbs. Automobiles increased these trends, and created back-seat sex (mobility, privacy, opportunity, virility...).
Low-to-zero-cost email created spam.
Low-to-zero-cost webhosting, plus copious data and ad networks: weaponised viral clickbait.
Low-cost long-distance service: robocalls, Carol from Account Services, and Microsoft Support calls.
Increased travel almost always introduces more disease vectors -- from the Silk Road to Roman highways to Columbus and the Age of Discovery cross-polinating old and new world diseases. James Burke of Connections suggested that the biggest legacy of the jet airliner age might be in epidemics. He made that observation in the mid-1990s, with hindsight on the AIDS epidemic (one "patient zero" was a flight attendent).
I'm trying to come up with a good general term for these effects -- along with pollution and systemic problems (crime, fraud, corruption, public health crises), I'm leaning toward "hygiene factors" -- things that can reduce your capabilities. Open to suggestions though.
What frustrates me about articles like this (even professional ones -- this simplifies for a general audience) is that they only look at one side of the equation. Low inflation is the opposite side, and it's interesting. Yes, GDP$ per unit hour has not gone up much, but the flip side is that the economic value of the output has gone down . If you look in terms of PPP, workers are doing better: fewer labor hours go in…
What is PPP?
A few rants (mixed in with a few half-baked ideas): 1) Economic progress from the industrial revolution is about quantity. We learned to make a lot more stuff. The industrial revolution is not quite done, but the impact is less and less every decade. We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff. And we're getting better stuff and more variety. 2) In…
You're wrong about one thing... The low skill jobs didn't vanish. They moved to places where wages and regulation (safety, environmental, etc) are less. The people who made Fisher Price toys in East Aurora, NY were made redundant by equally low/moderate skill workers in Mexico and later China. Your undershirt was made in North Carolina until the late 80s, and shifted to a variety of places until it hit the bottom --…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could go on, but you're never going to explain how your communication has actually worsened because you are unaware of it. Hell, I could give you a good dozen examples of interesting things that can't be communicated properly over long distance, but I'm never going to prove that here, am I? You're never going to understand how confident or uncertain I am. You're never going to grasp an idea that isn't already wei…
well that's true, I'm a little fishbowled because I work in devops, so my conversations are constrained to technical matters which don't require (if your team is any good) trust in anything but the code you review and accept. I restrict conversations about jobs, raises and things that require convincing to face to face encounters, but those are intermittent and not a daily or even weekly occurrence. since the majorit…
But some office jobs actually involve creativity which seriously profits from being in the same room from time to time,
Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…
> Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of cost of goods/services sold? Perhaps it's the overhead of capitalism. Marketing has a special feature - in a competitive market, it becomes a zero-sum game. You're putting an ever-increasing amount of money into it, but getting only marginal gains out of it. It's a coordination problem. As the industry grows, you end up with chains…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This always comes up, so I'll just leave this here: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Nothing new. The protagonist of the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road [1] by Richard Yates works a job that's mostly just figuring out ways to send stuff from his INBOX to other people with the right kind of notes on it to either delay its coming back for another day or two, or, ideally, result in someone else (many, many note-added forwards later) having to deal with it, and to look busy the rest of (most of) the time.…
I normally take a dim view of economics and this article is worse than usual. My complaint is the massless, frictionless world of economics does not take real world forces into account. > technological advancement just ain’t what it used to be. We're about to see millions of human roles vaporize when automated driving hits home. This isn't like the dishwasher or desktop calculator. We've already seen self checkout st…
I think you're giving this article shorter shrift than it deserves. While I don't feel it (or Gordon) quite puts its finger on the cause , it does a good job of quantifying the symptoms. Gordon does this at rather more length. In particular, we're seeing challenges, from within the economic establishment, of the prevailing view of the past 60 years or so that economic growth is normal and perpetual . On your first po…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Take Linux + Apache, for example. I can create a business for very little money because those are available to me for free. And if you do, that business shows up in the GDP.
And if you don't turn it into a business, it doesn't, even though a lot of people may find your hobby project interesting/useful. What's the commercial value of a free live streaming app that captures evidence of a (say, for the sake of argument) a police assault, which eventually leads to a riot? GDP is like a summary of all relevant execution paths through code. But it's really a list of paths that are considered r…
Clean your own house - no GDP.
Pay someone to clean your house - GDP.
Same amount of work is being done, but GDP only counts what is paid for.